I picked up a few words and even some sentences at the Victoria Writers Festival this past weekend. I gathered poet names and witnessed poems read and reacted to. I made contact with ideas I thought I had lost.
My day started with a workshop with Matt Rader called “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Poets”. I don’t think I got any new habits but I did cover 4 pages with words, questions, things to contemplate and “favorite lines”.
Some things I am thinking about:
– the idea of getting together with other writers, not to do writing exercises (or any writing for that matter) but to trade ideas, books and companionship
– the difference between “regular people’s” reactions to a poem and a writer’s reaction and the concept of people wanting to feel things from our poems
– I walk through a poem, occupy the space momentarily, let it become me – then I shed it, walk outside
And/or – Poems are intimate. There is a union of minds, a connection.
– are we all poets? > Sometimes I think we are all poets and our lives are poetry. Some think we can become poets by copying, liking, reading other poets – that we can be poets or better poets by breathing their air, stealing their shoes. . . .
Something to think about:
Craft is essential; I will work all my life at my craft. But craft is not the same thing as art. Craft is the knowledge of how to mix blue with yellow on my palette, but art is the courage to dip the brush into the paint and lay it on the canvas in my own way. Craft is knowing when to revise a manuscript and when to leave it alone, but art is the fire in the mind that put the story on the page in the first place. To grow in craft is to increase the breadth of what I can do, but art is the depth, the passion, the desire, the courage to be myself and myself alone, to communicate what I and only I can communicate: that which I have experienced or imagined. – Pat Schneider
thinking cap off
